190 ROUND THE YEAR 



example and training just as naturally as did the few 

 English farmers who dreamt of adopting improved 

 methods. The turnip, which Tusser 1 had called a 

 " kitchen-garden root to boil or butter," was slowly 

 taken up as winter-food for sheep. Blith (1652) 

 derides turnips altogether, and says that even swine 

 will only eat them when boiled. Jethro Tull claimed 

 to have raised turnips in the field in King William's 

 reign, but he adds that " the practice did not travel 

 beyond the hedges of my estate till after the peace of 

 Utrecht." Some of the Essex farmers, however, kept 

 their sheep upon turnips towards the end of the 

 seventeenth century. Townsend, who had seen them 

 grown as a field-crop in Hanover, made turnips and 

 clover his great study when in 1730 he turned his 

 back upon politics. He is said to have thereby 

 increased the value of some of his lands tenfold. It 

 was late in the eighteenth century before these crops 

 were common in remote counties, such as Devonshire 

 and Northumberland. About the same time English 

 turnips, as they were commonly called by foreigners, 

 began to be known in the more backward provinces 

 of Germany. Adam Smith shows us that the change 

 was complete by 1776, the date of his Wealth of 

 Nations. He there says of turnips, carrots and 

 cabbages that they are " things which were formerly 

 never raised but by the spade, but are now commonly 

 raised by the plough." (Book I. Chap. VIII.) 



Gilbert White * has noticed the change in the food 



1 Five hundredth points of good husbandry, 1573. 

 ' 2 Natural History of Selborne^ Letter 37. 



